00:00:07

James Redenbaugh: Hi, Simone. Hi. How you doing?

00:00:12

Simone Torrey: Good. I can't see you.

00:00:15

James Redenbaugh: What?

00:00:17

Simone Torrey: There we go. That's better. Yeah, you too.

00:00:24

James Redenbaugh: Happy Monday.

00:00:27

Simone Torrey: Yeah. You have a different view, but you just turned the other way, huh?

00:00:31

James Redenbaugh: I think so.

00:00:39

Simone Torrey: Yeah. How's it going?

00:00:42

James Redenbaugh: Pretty good. Been wedding planning all weekend.

00:00:48

Simone Torrey: Oh, exciting.

00:00:54

James Redenbaugh: Exciting.

00:00:56

Simone Torrey: Yeah. I was alone all weekend. My family went to visit the grandparents in Arizona, and so that was real nice to just go at my own flow, you know?

00:01:12

James Redenbaugh: Nice.

00:01:16

Simone Torrey: Yoga, gardening, farmers market, some partying. Good mix of everything.

00:01:23

James Redenbaugh: Nice. A good Bay Area time.

00:01:26

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:01:30

James Redenbaugh: I missed the bay come back. I think we're gonna end up moving back to the West Coast.

00:01:39

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:01:40

James Redenbaugh: At some point before too long. Yeah.

00:01:45

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:01:50

James Redenbaugh: Cool. Cool, cool. So, yeah, where should we mind. Where. Where should we start? What do you have in mind in terms of socials?

00:02:01

Simone Torrey: Yeah, so right now we're just doing Instagram, and I just created a LinkedIn page, you know, which is a whole other animal to figure out. But I'm. I'm thinking we just, you know, focus on those two. And the person that is working with us is really good with words. And as you also noticed, you're not very good with design. And so I wanted to pick you up on what you said. Like, I would love to create some templates for you guys. And, yeah, I don't know how that. How that would look like. So we use Canva for it. And in Canva, you can. You know, I put the colors in there and fonts and stuff, but, like. Yeah, I would love to understand more what. What you had in mind around templates. Like, what. How. What would be the elements? Because. Right.

00:03:05

Simone Torrey: You have to at least create, like, three, four. Like, currently we're doing two to three posts a week. So, yeah, there needs to be a possibility for lots of variation. And. And right now we're doing lots of carousels because apparently that gets most engagement and. Yeah.

00:03:32

James Redenbaugh: Awesome. Yeah. So let's have a look at what you have over here. So I'm gonna draw my.

00:03:47

Simone Torrey: So the two ones on the left, the pioneers and the Shasta Nelson quote, are the ones I created, and all the other ones Shift created.

00:04:00

James Redenbaugh: Cool. So, first of all, I think it's great to see that there's lots of information and different kinds of content that's being shared in here.

00:04:18

Simone Torrey: Yeah. So Shift created kind of like a social media, like, a story arc strategy for us with, like, some themes and. And then all these, like, tiny exercises come from, you know, a doc I created that has, like, 500 different. Of these tiny exercises on it. So we have a lot of material there, and the. The main goal is, you know, to build some kind of visible traction, but also to show potential partners kind of more what we're about. Right. Like, it feels like the webpage is the business card or the brochure, and this is more like a conversation. Right. Where we also share tidbits that you could experience on Alex, but then also highlight stuff like, you know, the chamber of connection and a quote from our partner stuff.

00:05:21

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. So a few things I noticed from this perspective is there's a lot of kind of disjointedness, and blocks be, like these rectangles of color.

00:05:46

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:05:47

James Redenbaugh: Things getting cut off there.

00:05:50

Simone Torrey: Yeah, that was me. I posted that, and I didn't post it in the right ratio, and you have to, like, take it down to correct it, so I didn't do that.

00:06:02

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, that's okay. But it would be awesome to have, like, a standardized template.

00:06:11

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:06:12

James Redenbaugh: That just makes it easy for you guys.

00:06:15

Simone Torrey: Yeah. Click on the bioneers one and click through that. What you think about that one? Like, no, back then you have to click on the little arrow. Yeah.

00:06:26

James Redenbaugh: This is great. I love this slide.

00:06:30

Simone Torrey: Yeah, keep going.

00:06:32

James Redenbaugh: I. I think that we always want to be cognizant of contrast ratios so that the gray on the green is a little hard to see.

00:06:45

Simone Torrey: I know. And it's also, like, just a little nod, you know, this is not content that I really want to pull attention to. It's.

00:06:55

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're. You're totally right. This is good. But the text seems to have a. Like, a shadow to it, and the dark shadow on the dark text actually makes it harder to read.

00:07:16

Simone Torrey: Oh.

00:07:19

James Redenbaugh: So if you. If you need to make a text stand out from the background, you want the shadow to be the opposite color of the text.

00:07:29

Simone Torrey: Right.

00:07:34

James Redenbaugh: And the border here makes it hard to read. So, like, I think that all of these should have the same font and font size and layout, and just the image should be different and the color.

00:07:52

Simone Torrey: Well, font size is hard when there's a different amount of text. Right.

00:07:59

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. But whenever. Whenever you can, you know, you can keep the. The tagline in this thing consistent, and then the quote can change size.

00:08:13

Simone Torrey: Right.

00:08:13

James Redenbaugh: And position if it needs to. Like, if you want to show the owls, I think it's okay to make it smaller, but consistency is key. Is there some kind of effect on this text?

00:08:31

Simone Torrey: Yes. You don't like those, huh?

00:08:41

James Redenbaugh: I don't like it.

00:08:45

Simone Torrey: Yeah. The canva effects.

00:08:47

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Unless, you know Again, unless it was on everything. Oh, I can show you in Canva too, because these. And it's not like you need Alex to feel like a super professional. Like, you have a huge team already. Like, it's okay that it feels homemade, but instead of having these rectangles, you could put a larger version of the same image behind and blur it out just to create a little more continuity. And this is nice, but I want to make you a background, you know, a version of this graphic that you can use. That feels really good. Like, I don't like how this shape just kind of ends right there. You know, there's like these hard lines in there where we could. We could make something like this. That just feels really good and continuous. And also this. This logo is a little blurry.

00:10:23

James Redenbaugh: Like, it's not the right.

00:10:24

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:10:26

James Redenbaugh: Image size.

00:10:27

Simone Torrey: Yeah, yeah, I. It should. Made that. And I don't know where it's from.

00:10:48

James Redenbaugh: And then similar things on these ones that shift made. I think that the. The fewer fonts, the better.

00:11:03

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:11:05

James Redenbaugh: So here there's 1, 2, 3, 4.

00:11:10

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:11:11

James Redenbaugh: Five different fonts. And there's, you know, 1, 2, 3 different text styles. Four, like, this has outline. This has no outline. This has. Yeah, this has a different kind of shadow, and I think it should just be all the same. I mean, logo different. But I mean, it's okay if you have, like a life and loneliness kind of icon.

00:11:46

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:11:47

James Redenbaugh: We don't need any borders. These are the same color. If it's. If it's a yellow background, it should just be dark text. I don't think you need the. The character spacing. I don't know what that's. What that's doing.

00:12:10

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:12:11

James Redenbaugh: If we have an icon like this, let's make it big, you know? Yeah, why not?

00:12:18

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:12:30

James Redenbaugh: And so this is all a. Oh, yeah.

00:12:33

Simone Torrey: How are you doing this drawing? On top of the. Do you have, like, a figma overlay or is this a whiteboard or what is this?

00:12:43

James Redenbaugh: It's. It's just in zoom. There's the annotate button. Oh, yeah, you can do it too.

00:12:55

Simone Torrey: I didn't know that. How do you get to that?

00:12:59

James Redenbaugh: It's just one of the buttons in the zoom controls. You know where it says, like, share screen or chat, There should be a pencil icon. No, I can't share the zoom.

00:13:17

Simone Torrey: No, I can figure it out. I'll look for it.

00:13:23

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, Yeah, I love it. And then my screen is a. Is a tablet, so I can draw on it.

00:13:32

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:13:34

James Redenbaugh: So like these this morning. Imagination sparks. If this is something that you want to consistently put out. Should be like, I think of it like a series or not quite a sub brand, but basically a sub brand of Alex.

00:14:06

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:14:07

James Redenbaugh: Some contradicting stuff here. So there's your life plus loneliness and that. That shows up on all these posts, actually.

00:14:17

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:14:19

James Redenbaugh: But it's not so clear why. Okay, so we got your body, your life. I think that these are. We could think about each of these as little booklets. And so the title one can kind of be the COVID Like, here's morning imagination Sparks. And we're going to get into that and we're going to tell you what, what this is about.

00:14:58

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:14:59

James Redenbaugh: And then as you turn the pages, we don't need this.

00:15:04

Simone Torrey: Yeah. We don't need to repeat this. Huh?

00:15:08

James Redenbaugh: It can, you know, just, we can get into it.

00:15:14

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:15:19

James Redenbaugh: But I can pretty easily take like half an hour or an hour and take some of this stuff and show you how I would do it. And then that can become a template for future stuff.

00:15:40

Simone Torrey: And like, with some guidelines, for example, don't use more than two fonts, same size. Can you speak a little bit to why consistency is important?

00:15:53

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, good question. One, it just, it helps people digest the information. So mentally, anytime there's a font switch, it takes some mental energy. Like your brain actually shifts gears a little bit. I'm reading this power of interdependence, and then it's like, okay, a new font. And my brain has to think like, is there a reason that this is different?

00:16:23

Simone Torrey: What's.

00:16:24

James Redenbaugh: What's the reason? Or these two different thoughts that are being presented at me. And if there is a reason for it, then that's one thing. But if there's not, then we don't want that. And generally a post, it's like we want it to feel like one main thing, not a whole bunch of little things like, what's the one thing behind this post? What's the purpose of this post? And then if everything is resonant with that one purpose, then I think it will better serve the goal. It's more likely to be helpful for people. And you want to show potential investors, like this kind of. This gallery. And so we want each one to kind of stand on its own and be its own little thing. And then showing, having consistency between elements just shows a level of thoughtfulness and care.

00:17:45

James Redenbaugh: And like, if the Alex logo and the arrow were the same size and position in all of these, then I wouldn't be thinking about it, you know, here and not, you know, I might notice the Alex brand and in the arrow, but instead I come here and I'm like, oh, Alex is. Alex is kind of all over the place.

00:18:14

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:18:15

James Redenbaugh: And that's not the brand impression that you want to have.

00:18:18

Simone Torrey: No, no.

00:18:22

James Redenbaugh: And so maybe in Canva we can have a template where certain things are locked. So if you want the Alex logo and an arrow, then like that's always in the same exact place.

00:18:34

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:18:35

James Redenbaugh: Or you can turn it off.

00:18:37

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:18:38

James Redenbaugh: But it's like those are the two options.

00:18:42

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:18:43

James Redenbaugh: On or off. Instead of like always deciding where everything is.

00:18:52

Simone Torrey: I just put in the chat a very successful Instagram account of like a kind of like minded, you know, brand. They're very focused on nervous system regulation and like personal practice. And their style is very black and white. But there's. There's something. Yeah, I would love to hear your thoughts about it. The pin post is really cool. I think this kind of like three tiles that work perfectly together.

00:19:33

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to talk about is the use of images and what's possible there because Instagram is an opportunity to use more images, but we would want to do it in a mindful way. And there's a lot of like background images with color overlays. But I think things like this are really powerful. I mean, that's a video. Things like this, you know, they have a style and a brand when they're using images. And then their graphic posts are super consistent.

00:20:24

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:20:26

James Redenbaugh: And that's like, great, you know, awesome. I see the. What's the one idea? You know, here's public. Pablo Picasso. Two little drawings, two little lines. See, the text doesn't have to be very large for it to be.

00:20:47

Simone Torrey: And then they have two of the same. That's interesting.

00:20:53

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

00:20:55

Simone Torrey: Oh, with some additional info. Got it. Yeah. They promote a lot of the same ideas than us, you know, creativity and nervous system regulation. But then it's not relationship focused.

00:21:20

James Redenbaugh: And little diagrams go a long way too. These are really simple. But.

00:21:31

Simone Torrey: Yeah, I feel like they have good design.

00:21:36

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah, maybe.

00:21:42

Simone Torrey: But powerful. I mean, they really have a pattern of. Right. When there's a white post and a black post and an image.

00:21:51

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, it's really consistent too. Never two black posts next to each other.

00:22:01

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:22:07

James Redenbaugh: There'S another one. Let me think. I can find it real quick.

00:23:35

Simone Torrey: So would the best be that I just. That I give you our Canva login or something? Because we. We log in with, like, a shared email community at Village Builders.

00:23:55

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, you can.

00:24:07

Simone Torrey: Yeah, I see what you mean. With the logo.

00:24:13

James Redenbaugh: Really consistent. And then. Yeah, see, they'll vary the font a little bit, but if there's a name. Yeah, the same. Yeah, possible. It's always the same. And then the background images are really consistent.

00:24:30

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:24:34

James Redenbaugh: No, this is before Instagram changed format. And so these were.

00:24:41

Simone Torrey: Yeah, yeah, that was such a big deal. Kind of threw everybody's beauty off on a platform that's built on beauty.

00:25:03

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

00:25:09

Simone Torrey: Yeah, but I see what you mean. Oh, and they have a very clear strategy. It's like promoting the episodes. Right.

00:25:31

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. I can't find the one that I'm thinking of, but I think that this is a great precedent. And let's look at one of these. So power your small talk.

00:26:25

Simone Torrey: Yeah, there's no need to repeat that on every slide. Right.

00:26:30

James Redenbaugh: And what purpose is this serving up here?

00:26:43

Simone Torrey: It would only serve a purpose if they were, like, clear categories. Right. So people can know right away, oh, this is about X.

00:26:57

James Redenbaugh: I don't think.

00:26:59

Simone Torrey: And I also don't like the negative framing because this is not about your life and loneliness. It's about your life and connection.

00:27:05

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

00:27:06

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:27:08

James Redenbaugh: I think we should do away with the loneliness.

00:27:11

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:27:13

James Redenbaugh: And then I think the first slide should have something to do with questions or conversations, you know, like speech bubbles or a picture talking.

00:27:26

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:27:28

James Redenbaugh: And I think that the. The image can be a lot more prominent. I'll play with some stuff.

00:27:37

Simone Torrey: Yeah. I'm just wondering if it's possible to create like, a little bit of an icon language for. For, like, our different categories. So we have. We kind of have these five pillars. Right. If you go on the website, on the about page, kind of the research foundations. Yeah, yeah. So relationship science, village building, trauma informed, or like nervous system regulation, and then creativity and behavior change. Those are kind of our main pillars that we want to talk about. Right. In. In different ways. So it would be cool to have some visual language to accompany that, because the. Yeah, currently the. Yeah, I'm not. Not quite sure if that. The current language on the website has that or the. You know, that. Just what we have from Munya.

00:28:56

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, totally. I think that's a great idea. And I think that you should have the. The Instagram posts either align to these categories or. Or these, you know, like, as a set of nine. Nine different things or something like that. That really reinforces the brand instead of.

00:29:32

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:29:33

James Redenbaugh: New. New categories. Like, I think it's okay to have, like, body, mind, spirit, Or. Or something like that. But if. If there were icons for each of these, and I could see in the Instagram account different posts that fit into different categories. That could be really neat. And also were talking about eventually having like a. A kind of library of resources.

00:30:01

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:30:03

James Redenbaugh: Eventually all of those things could connect and the posts could also be in that library and they could have these kind of categories. Creativity, trauma.

00:30:28

Simone Torrey: Or nervous system regulation, you know?

00:30:31

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Brain, body, nervous system. We can play with these. I think they don't need to be too literal.

00:31:02

Simone Torrey: No.

00:31:04

James Redenbaugh: Nice little village. Done. Done. Relationship science.

00:31:21

Simone Torrey: Yeah. Let's make sure it doesn't go too much towards, you know, romantic relationships.

00:31:28

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah, Nita. Well, we can play with that. I'd love to get Money's take on this too.

00:31:46

Simone Torrey: Cool.

00:31:52

James Redenbaugh: Cool, cool.

00:31:56

Simone Torrey: Sweet.

00:31:58

James Redenbaugh: Okie dokie.

00:32:01

Simone Torrey: What do you think is the timeline on some of this? So let me see. Let me just summarize some. Some things we talked about. And then that could be like, you know, the first draft.

00:32:25

James Redenbaugh: Mm.

00:32:48

Simone Torrey: Okay. Oh, yeah. And then one cool thing would also be Instagram banner. All right, so we have these beautiful. How many are they? Five colors or so. I think there's. There's the potential of doing a cool pattern. Right. With using them in like the right sequence and then every now and then sprinkle in an image as a cover.

00:33:49

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. I think that you could do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 images or color backgrounds and then image. Because if it's. If it's just five, then you won't really perceive a pattern. Yeah, but we can mock that up in. In Figma grid could look like. But I think that I would love to see more solid colors or color with the texture that we have on the top and then start graphics and sometimes images. But if images are used, you know, making sure they're really relevant and in a consistent style. And I think showing more people on Instagram is a good idea.

00:35:14

Simone Torrey: Yeah. That's a tricky one, though. Like, I. I like how open has these, like, blurry images and then you only use pictures of people when it's like, you know, featuring a teacher or a partner or something.

00:35:39

James Redenbaugh: Yeah.

00:35:49

Simone Torrey: Yeah. Cool. So I have kind of like start the five color backgrounds plus one image pattern. Then I have limited two fonts per slide max. Right.

00:36:10

James Redenbaugh: Mm.

00:36:13

Simone Torrey: More consistency of like, logo placement and size or not more just consistency. Have a cover slide in a carousel. Use the categories consistent with brand, like the five pillars and product features, or however we call that. And then. Did I miss anything?

00:36:54

James Redenbaugh: Icons for those five Things Cat pictures. People always love cat pictures.

00:37:08

Simone Torrey: Cat pictures.

00:37:11

James Redenbaugh: The library of cats to choose from.

00:37:15

Simone Torrey: Are you serious? But we do need a library of good blurry or, you know, good like people pictures. Either from the back or something.

00:37:31

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, let me see what I can find. Also, the new Mid Journey is really great.

00:37:46

Simone Torrey: The what?

00:37:48

James Redenbaugh: The Mid Journey. Mid Journey image generator. They just released a new version of their model like two days ago and it's really powerful and you can give it really specific style prompts. So if we have a style, figure out a style of people. Not necessarily blurry people, but some way to show people that's not necessarily like super focused on their. On their face. We could generate some nice images that way without it feeling like it's just a bunch of AI generated content.

00:38:40

Simone Torrey: Cool. So again, what are you going to work on? So you're going to create some icons for the five pillars.

00:39:00

James Redenbaugh: Canva template for these. I'll start in Figma and just kind of mock up some. Some stuff, but then we can build it in. In canva.

00:39:12

Simone Torrey: Is that, is that time efficient or should I just give you straight away the access or do you just have more features in figma?

00:39:22

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, in Figma we can it. It's much faster to build custom stuff in there and then what we arrive on, we can move over to Canva.

00:39:35

Simone Torrey: Ooh, that looks like open.

00:39:41

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, I prompted it with one of the open. Oh, cool images just to do it.

00:39:46

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:39:50

James Redenbaugh: But we could find another image style.

00:39:53

Simone Torrey: Our old style. Yeah.

00:39:55

James Redenbaugh: Unstock ski and then, you know, have that be a consistent things.

00:40:00

Simone Torrey: Cool. Awesome. Yay.

00:40:05

James Redenbaugh: Sweet. What proportion of our effort this month do you think should go into this compared to the prototype work?

00:40:25

Simone Torrey: I mean, the prototype is definitely priority. Yeah. Proportion. Interesting question. Oh, yeah, we're just at the beginning of the month. Right. How far do you think we're. How far away are we from. With. With the prototype?

00:40:57

James Redenbaugh: Good question. Well, I think that we're close to an arrival point and then there's likely going to be more that we want to do with it. So it's up to you guys. The, the more we do with it, the more we see that we can do with it, which, yeah, is to be expected. I think it's up to you guys where. Where you want to draw the line.

00:41:41

Simone Torrey: Mm. Yeah. And then the other thing that we're gonna need this month is to get started on the. Some kind of mocks for the map, you know, the village map, because, you know, we need some differentiators. Even though this is our prototype, we need some, like, clear differentiators from, like, why wouldn't I just use a chat GPT? Oh, because Alex will create this for you know.

00:42:18

James Redenbaugh: Yeah, yeah.

00:42:20

Simone Torrey: So we need, like, one or two things that we can show and that we can also start testing with people. Like, is a map really the thing that people will find exciting? Like, I hope so, but we need to, like. Yeah, we need to start testing that.

00:42:36

James Redenbaugh: Cool. So that's helpful. Why don't I look at where we're at with the. With the prototype and then kind of propose a breakdown? Like, I think we should spend this percentage of our effort on continuing to develop the prototype. Percentage on that. That mockup, which I'm really excited to start, and this percentage on. On social media assets.

00:43:05

Simone Torrey: Cool.

00:43:07

James Redenbaugh: Cool.

00:43:09

Simone Torrey: Great. So we have, I think. Do we have a calls. Yeah, we have a call scheduled for Wednesday. That's awesome. Yeah. So hopefully then next week we can get started kind of thinking about that map mock. Because really, by the end of the month, we need to, like, start fundraising. We're. We're starting to go get pretty low on our fund, so.

00:43:44

James Redenbaugh: Cool.

00:43:45

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:43:46

James Redenbaugh: Okie dokie.

00:43:48

Simone Torrey: Alrighty. Yeah, thank you so much. This was already super helpful, you know, like. Yeah. With that, I can already do things a little bit better.

00:44:01

James Redenbaugh: Awesome. Glad to hear.

00:44:03

Simone Torrey: Yeah, sweet. Thank you so much. I'm really. I'm really enjoying collaborating with all the guys, you know, like, you. You're also thoughtful and kind and wonderful. Yeah, it feels. It feels more villagey like that, rather than just me and Adam, you know, two people doesn't make a village.

00:44:24

James Redenbaugh: Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.

00:44:28

Simone Torrey: Yeah.

00:44:29

James Redenbaugh: Well, great. I'll talk to you soon. See you on Wednesday, right?

00:44:32

Simone Torrey: Yep. Bye, friend.

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